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Crucible of Words – Standard Through National Events by Cyrus Bales

First off, I’d like to apologize for not having written an article recently. I usually aim to produce them more often, but I had been busy building and testing for Nats and PT Phily, and since my testing for Phily got thrown out the window with the Modern change, my time was even more pressed. Anyway, I thought I’d make time to get an article out before Nats about the format at large, enjoy.

This weekend saw an incredible event in the standard metagame, two national tournaments (Spain and Germany), both of which had not a single UW Caw-Blade deck in their top 8. Yes, there was a Esper-Blade deck in Spain, but even so, that’s an incredibly result considering the consensus amongst a lot of players.

This top 8 is rather interesting, RDW has been considered dead by many players thanks to [card]Timely Reinforcements[/card] and the abundance of Caw-Blade decks. However in Germany, it seems alive and well, taking up most of the top 8 spots.

SPAIN TOP 8.

UR Twin Steel UR Twin UR Twin RUG Pod Grixis Twin Esper-Blade UG Mill

This top 8 is very much slanted towards Twin, without a single UB or RDW deck in sight. What does this mean? Either the field was unprepared for the Twin archetype, or Twin is just the go-to popular deck in Spain, much like Caw is in the US.

So, in terms of information that is usable for us in the UK, what can we get out of these results? Clearly, Caw-Blade is not â€œThe Best Deckâ€ as many people would lead you to believe, but rather it is one of many viable archetypes in the field. Each metagame around the globe seems to be different, and I expect the UK to be the same, with its own most popular deck, Valakut.

Valakut has always been popular in the UK, and holds a larger portion of the field than in other countries, and I believe that if any deck is the best in the format at present, it’s Valakut. The reason I say this is because there are a surprisingly different amount of ways to build the deck, from [card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card], [card]Oracle of Mul Daya[/card], [card]Solemn Simulacrum[/card] to threat heavy decks packing extra [card]Inferno Titan[/card] and even the variable removal suite of [card]Dismember[/card], [card]Lightning Bolt[/card], [card]Slagstorm[/card] and [card]Beast Within[/card]. A lot of Valakut decks stay with one build, rather than altering for the metagame, and there are a lot of people who play the deck because they think it’s a good autopilot deck, these bring the overall performance of the archetype down, since there are a lot of decisions to be made with the deck. This versatility gives it the ability to beat just about any deck, as well as it’s staple good match ups of Steel and Caw Blade.

A good example of a good Valakut builder/player was shown to me over the last week or so, watching some friends of mine test. The Valakut player was against UB control, and boarded into a huge amount of threats, so even after a [card]Memoricide[/card], his deck able to have the power to beat down and win the game. This shows how the perceived bad match up of UB can be improved with clever building and sideboarding, to the point where he removed a couple of [card]Primeval Titan[/card] to make Memoricide less back breaking, but still had an effective six titans thanks to Green Sun’s Zenith. People describing Valakut as a glass canon against black decks and putting it down to the match up, or those who do something about it are the difference between those who’ll be getting some Pro Points this weekend, and those who won’t.

Just to finish off, there was another national event this weekend just passed:

This last top 8 shows us a lot about the format, many decks are viable, even some that are a little more rogue, like Goblins. But with Valakut, Caw, Twin, Pod and UB, this is probably a great snapshot of the current standard format overall, with each country skewing it slightly towards its preferred deck.

Did you enjoy this article? I will get a free Booster Pack for every 20 Facebook Likes this article receives. If you enjoyed what you’ve read then please remember to hit the â€œLikeâ€ button at below. Thank you kindly in advance

I've been playing magic since Judgment, but only got involved in organised play when Lorwyn came out. Since then I've developed my game and built up a reputation as a deckbuilder. I spent a decent amount of time on the Wizards Forums spawned several standard archetypes, most famously Twin Sanity, but also the RUG land destruction deck during SOA-ZEN, Tezz-Infect and RWB Reanimator. I made the Pro Tour for the first Modern event in Philadelphia.

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At GP Lyon(modern) I played a Junk Rock deck, and with Modern PTQ season having rolled around, I sleeved it up again with a few tweaks for the PTQ at Chesham. Today I’ll go over the changes I made and give you a run-down of how it played in the tournament.